


Visit Hours

by Random_ag



Category: Bendy and the Ink Machine
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Animal Death, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Recovery, Violence, bad stuff generally, i never say this but Willy belongs to Control_Room, theres so little batim i swear it may as well be original but i cant do that
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-25
Updated: 2018-08-25
Packaged: 2019-07-02 10:46:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,063
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15794934
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Random_ag/pseuds/Random_ag
Summary: The first times he visits, he stands in front of the door and feels uneasy.The second time he visits, he's greeted by Florence and the Machine.The seventh time he visits, he doesn't make it to the door.The fourteenth time he visits, the room has a blue hue.The time he visits, he didn't expect it.





	Visit Hours

The first times he visits, he stands in front of the door and feels uneasy.

Because there’s something really, subtly wrong in seeing him like that.

In the way he sits, posture pristine, under white sheets in the white bed of a white room, a white pillow against the back of his white, short-sleeved vest.

In how dark and clean and frail and skinny his arms look in this white world around him.

In the box that covers his head.

In his breathing, with loud inhales and exhales as if he was trying to calm down.

Willy stares at his chest rising and falling regularly and he feels uneasy.

It shouldn’t be like that. It shouldn’t almost move at all. It shouldn’t be so loud.

“I hate this.”

The voice is not raspy, it doesn’t creak and crack and rattle. It sounds polished but allarmingly wheezy.

“The box.” Eska continues as he gets no answer.

“They don’t let me keep my mask. They don’t let me make one. They gave me this. It doesn’t help. I hate it. I can’t see. I can’t move. I can’t breath.”

Neither speak for a little.

Despite his chest moving, he looks lifeless.

Not as usual. It’s a different kind of dead.

Usually, Eska looks like a possessed puppet, a zombie, a ghost. Someone that nobody in good conscience can consider alive, and yet he moves, he eats, he walks, he stares, he blinks, he creeps the crap out of everybody.

This is not that. This is… Lobotomized. Someone under heavy drugs.

 

> ~~to check his face they have to give him bear narcotics or he’ll wake up and bring hell on Earth. that’s what they said. he’s a problem child. a terrible patient. they knock him out with medicine and hope it does it. it doesn’t do it. it never does.~~

“Come closer.”

It’s air with the vague sound of words. Willy comes closer.

He’s at the side of the bed. Mechanically, one of his hands flies into Eska’s and holds it. It is held back. The box tilts and hits his arm, and something inside it slides and hits it too with a soft ‘thump’.

How he wishes he could see the eyes in the wooden skull right now.

“Did you call the hotline?”

He hates lying. He doesn’t want him to lie, because he worries, and he loves him, and wants him to be okay.

And if Willy lies, something happened, and he wasn’t there, and he wasn’t helping, and it could be his fault.

“No.” Willy answers. Because he really hasn’t.

His hand is squeezed a little. Perhaps as a sigh of relief.

“Hm.”

There’s something wrong in Eska’s monotone.

 

* * *

 

_She hid around corners and she hid under beds, she killed it with kisses and from it she fled_

The second time he visits, he’s greeted by Florence and the Machine.

Wherever he hid whatever is playing Dog Days Are Over must be a pretty damn good hiding place, and the nurses are probably fretting over trying to find it to burn it in an incinerator.

He doesn’t even try to figure it out. Eska can be way too smart.

Speaking of whom, he doesn’t look any better.

Willy approaches him immediately, without waiting for an order or a request, and squeezes his hand oh so gently.

His friend holds it, lifts it, moves it around, as if unsure of what to do. Then he leans back on the pillow and gives a bark. Loudly.

Someone outside the door gets startled and a lot of things fall. He doesn’t laugh.

He puts Willy’s hand close to his shoulder, and his friend rubs it like he’s trying to give him some sort of hope.

Because Eska doesn’t scream unless you ask him what’s on his mind and he lets out the souls of the damned who have stored into his body as he was silent for shits and giggle. When he wants to scream, be it for anger, despair, sadness, happiness, Eska keeps quiet. The most he does is bark.

Florence keeps filling their lack of words with echoing vocals and ukulele chords accompanied by drums.

_The dog days are over, the dog days are done. Can you hear the horses? ‘Cause here they come_

“The horses aren’t coming.”

Willy almost shivers at how vivid the bitter pinch of emotion in that voice is.

 

* * *

 

The seventh time he visits, he doesn’t make it to the room.

The doctors and nurses hold him back, tell him it’s a bad day, he’s unstable, he’s unfit for visits, come back another time, today it’s not a good idea.

What happened? forms in his mind seconds before the closing door is slammed open with strength sufficient to almost knock a nurse out and Eska stomps his bare feet in the corridor.

He is standing, with his back straight and the white vest that actually fits him, and he looks almost taller than he really is, which is still very. His box is torn and a little broken, and, on the side of it, there are words written in what is more than likely crayon - the color of lavander.

He stays for a couple of seconds and slams the door closed. He probably returns to his bed.

In that short time, Willy read what he wanted to tell him.

**I’m in time-out.**

Eska is not a sociable person. He’s easier to befriend than to be befriended by.

He hates being sociable. He hates being touched by those he doesn’t trust. He hates having people try and take away his comfort zone.

So when another patient threw away his box, he attacked him. The fellow was recovered. Eska was found forcing his head in the box in a corner of a room and escorted back to his own.

No one can visit today. Maybe not even tomorrow. We’ll have to keep him here, alone, where he can’t hurt others.

“What about himself?”

That’s the pressing question. Because that’s what scares him.

He was put here for that. For trying to get that rope to snap his life in a breathless second.

Don’t worry, they say. It’s all safe.

Willy stares at the door from afar and worries.

 

* * *

 

 

The fourteenth time he visits, the room has a blue hue.

Eska looks asleep - head leaning a bit forward, body slumped breaking his usually perfect sitting position, hands abandoned on his lap.

He takes a chair this time, and sits next to him.

“Why are you listening to this?”

The box turns slightly to face him. He wishes he could see his mismatched eyes.

A weak voice spurts from underneath the cardboard, and it wavers like that of someone who can’t stop crying: “I’m so alone.”

Willy lays his head on Eska’s lap. He watches his hands and arms moving away, and feels his head lowering, spine hunching, arms lifting, grasping and laying the box on Eska’s legs, right in front of his eyes.

And then he feels him bending a little more and finally something soft, sweet and in need of comfort gently dives into Willy’s hair, fingers close behind running through the dark curls. A long, deep breath takes in the scent of lavander he has missed terribly, so strong it almost makes him drunk.

And then there’s a sob, and his own darker hands fly gently to rustle and try to comb the gusty, oily strands of hair on top of an emanciated face. A face he’s never seen, a face he could just turn around and finally discover.

But a bigger voice in his head scares that thought away yelling at it for even thinking of betraying such a proof of trust and failing him.

Eska caresses his head and cries missing a fox named after a dish he can’t sleep without. Willy holds him until all goes out and he decides to stop Regina Spektor from singing  _Blue lips, blue veins_  on repeat in a well of melancholy.

They stay hugged in such a strange way for thirty minutes. Then a nurse comes in and wakes Willy up, because the time for the visit has ended.

He doesn’t even try to take a look at Eska’s face.

 

* * *

 

The time  _he_  visits, he didn’t expect him.

He doesn’t move from in front of the door, tall, skinny, clothes ragged and smelly, skeleton placed on his face to cancel all feelings from sight.

Willy stares with a mouth that begins to open.

Eska hugs him without a word. He abuses the power of his height to wrap all of himself around his dearest friend and kisses the top of his head.

He stares after letting the other go. Then he turns and goes away.

Willy remains, petrified.

For the next two months, he worries.

Stares at the cieling trying to sleep, Shawn’s warmth at his side trying to unsuccesfully seduce him into closing his eyes.

Thinks.

_Where is he._

_Did he escape the clinic._

_Is he hurt._

_How did he find his mask._

_What is he doing now._

_Why did he show up like that._

_When will he send news._

_Will he send news._

_Is he alive._

Judging by how solid he feels when he bumps face first into his thorax, head in the clouds, he is.

He doesn’t even move away, he just raises his eyes to meet his up there in the sky and they have a stare down of epic proportions before he notices something yapping against his stomach.

Eska shoves with care the not-old-not-young dog into his arms.

“Yours.”

He sounds raspy, creaking, cracking, rattling.

“… Is it… he… she…”

“For you.”

“… Where in the living hell have you been?”

“Home.”

“For two months?”

“Stay over.”

That’s how he ends up at Eska’s for a whole night. He makes Willy sit down and cooks some instant soup.

There’s a bandicoot in his house. And an opossum that wraps around Eska’s neck as soon as he enters.

Also, lizards.

He’s actually glad there are so many fucking slithery four-legged bastards running around and looking at him with their reptile eyes.

It means he’s doing good.

“What are their names?”

“Her, Burkāns.” as he points to the small marsupial on a chair.

“Her, Søpple.” as he scratches the banshee rodent around his neck.

“What do they mean?”

“Carrot in Latvian and Trash in Norwegian.”

Creative.

They earn a giggle.

“And the lizards?”

“You know.”

A small reptile makes her way onto Willy’s shoe. He bends down and scratches her head gently: “Hello, Stuhl.”

Káltsa doesn’t greet him; instead he brings honor to his and his predecessor’s name by hiding in a lone, black sock, cozy and warm and snug as the bugs he enjoys eating.

Making the soup takes five minutes.

Waiting for it to cool down and actually eating it takes not enough time for Eska to give an articulated answer.

By the time the plates are empty, Willy is only one hundred percent certain sure of two things: trash cans are the easiest way to find clothes, food and accidental friends such as a malnourished opossum, and the dog is his.

Also, he needs a name.

Eska suggests Salami.

Willy replies one can’t name a dog like that.

Some sort of giggle rolls out of his friend’s mouth.

It’s so good to see Eska curl in a ball on his mattress.

Willy looks at him for a minute, lost in his thoughts. That, rolled up next to him on the barest bed in the whole world, is Eska. His best friend. The same he has visited trapped in a white room, under white sheets, in a white vest, sitting on a white kip with his back against a white pillow and a cardboard box on his head.

The same who listened to people saying the days were over and gone and how human a color could be, missing endlessly a ten-year-old dead fox and not sleeping because there wasn’t anything to replace Pizzocchero’s presence.

“Goodnight.” he mutters.

His head remains buried in the snoring opossum and bandicoot protected by the circle his arms draw around them. His mask rests on the floor; a speck of his face is shown.

Willy ignores it and lays on his back. His new dog climbs up to his stomach.

Shawn will name him.

“Goodnight.”

His eyelids grow heavy and finally, he sleeps.


End file.
